bike and swim

Bike 9.6 miles and swim 1000 meters.

aborted read

Colorado resident Temple Grandin got a fair bit of press a couple of years ago for Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, so I picked it up. I've read about 50 pages and that's enough. I feel bad because maybe her writing style is a function of her autism, and therefore to dislike the style is to be mean to her autism. I'm content just to feel stupid about feeling bad because I know that I am, in fact, not being mean.

She tells the reader that cows don't like yellow. Okay. She doesn't need to say that another three times in those first 50 pages, does she? Not only the same fact (or observation) repeated over a few score of pages but in the same paragraph as well:

Although growing a big neocortex gave us our "book smarts," we paid a price. For one thing, bigger frontal lobes probably made humans a lot more vulnerable to brain damage and dysfunction of just about any kind. I wonder whether this explains why you don't often see animals with developmental disabilities. Estimates of the incidence of mental retardation range from 1 percent of the U.S. population up to as high as 3 percent, and it doesn't seem like there's anywhere near that level in animals. It's possible we human don't know what a developmental disability in an animal looks like, but I also question whether animals might be less vulnerable to developmental disabilities in the first place because their frontal lobes are less developed.

(An interesting idea, but anecdotal; also, animals perhaps don't have developmental disabilities because humans are (sometimes) humane and don't let the imperfect die, as animals must do.)

Furthermore, it's irritatingly memoir-esque and chatty and I don't need every last item spelled out in words of one syllable.